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About Me

I live and blog in Ann Arbor, Michigan. University of Michigan BA and MA from Eastern Michigan University. One term in the Michigan Army National Guard. The Institute of Land Warfare, Army magazine, Infantry Magazine, Military Review, Naval Institute Proceedings, and Joint Force Quarterly have published my occasional articles. See "Published Works" on the web version for citations.

The Undead Archives

My undead archives pre-Blogger were actually restored to life after Geocities sites went dark. Start at the old home page here.
If you find a link to the old site on the current site or old site, you should be able to replace the "g" in "geocities" with an "r" and make a good link.
Another archived site is here.
It replaces the ".com" with ".ws".
I hope to move all the older archives here (and started that project) but it is really tedious.

Wednesday, June 14, 2017

A Nation of Ideas and Not Blood and Soil

Too often, the left turns off their ears and brains and assumes deeply held hatred for opposing their open borders multi-cultural views (seriously, your mild-mannered host has experienced that--and no, it was not a coincidence that happened a week after Trump won the election). Let me defend myself on this score. I shouldn't have to. But the culture is what it is.

America is a nation of ideas and not of blood and soil. You are an American by the ideas you hold and not by your ethnic origins. So talk of how white Americans will one day be a minority doesn't actually bother me as long as whoever is here cherishes the ideas of individual freedom, democracy, and rule of law that America started in 1776. The America of 1776 is different than the America of 1865, 1965, 2017, and whatever year in the future, but is still (or should be) "America" regardless of the religious and ethnic composition of the people who are its citizens.

I don't care if these immigrants leave behind their societies and embrace our nation of ideas, that is. It's sad enough that born Americans don't always share those ideas (hello safe-space fascists, I'm talking to you), but they can't be kicked out. But we can at least make sure immigrants can embrace those ideas.

And immigration policies are part of this embrace. If too many come in at one time, the ability to resist assimilation is increased. Halting illegal immigration in order to make sure legal immigration encompasses assimilation is vitally important.

Truly, it is shocking that the so-called nuanced left can't distinguish support for legal immigration from opposition to illegal immigration. How is controlling our own borders not a basic job all should support?

That's aside from whether America truly tries to assimilate immigrants rather than embrace diversity to the extent of encouraging Balkanization rather than assimilation in our country.

And we have to consider that in an Internet-connected world, it is harder for modern immigrants from societies with different ideas than ours to assimilate.

But with limits on numbers and policies that don't get in the way of assimilation, I have confidence that America can assimilate Moslem immigrants as America has assimilated past waves of immigrants.

We already do a pretty good job, relatively speaking. My confidence in Europe's ability to assimilate is pretty low, by contrast.

But here? With the right policies that make them new Americans rather than just representing the Western Hemisphere branch of their Old World tribal conflicts, Moslems will have no more desire to plant bombs in the name of Islamic solidarity than I have desire to plant bombs to end British rule of Northern Ireland.

And we can fight jihadis even as we assimilate our own Moslem immigrants. There is no conflict and we should not cripple the former in the false belief it is at odds with the latter any more than we couldn't fight Germany in two world wars and Italy, Japan, North Vietnam, Britain, Mexico, and Spain and also accept immigrants from all of those countries and make them part of America.

Seriously people, isn't arguing we can't fight and killed jihadis because it might offend Moslems in general the real problem by that argument's assumption that Moslems in general oppose fighting jihadis when Moslems overseas are the major victim of jihadi rage?

We can make anyone an American regardless of the blood and soil from which they come, unlike most of the world.

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Note on site statistics: When I strip out the junk hits from Blogger statistics that seem to come and go in waves, I appear to have about 10,000 hits per month.

My old statistics package, Site Meter, seems to miss a lot and even disappears visits after they've appeared.

I just added a new StatCounter. So far it shows far fewer hits than Blogger and is more in line with Site Meter. But I suspect neither of the non-Blogger statistics register hits from social media. So I'm not sure what my audience size is. It is puzzling to me.

Of course, it is quite possible that my failure to use Facebook and Twitter has handicapped me in getting an audience. Or it may be an additional issue. I may be a blogosaur!